Owing to a paper shortage and a change in voter registration documents, it’s become that much harder for some of the most marginalized Texans to register to vote this year. The Texas Secretary of State’s office told NPR Austin affiliate KUT that voting rights groups are now restricted to just 1,000 to 2,000 voter registration forms per request. According to the president of the League of Women Voters of Texas, just one chapter of the group in Houston requires thousands more ballots, especially when it comes to registering new voters who have recently become naturalized citizens.
”The League in Houston registers about 30,000 new citizens every year through these ceremonies in the past,” Grace Chimene told KUT. Texas
Texas ranks in the top three percentage for naturalized citizens, with 69,400 naturalizations approved in Texas in 2021 alone. Though a registration form was previously more easily available to Texans, that form has changed due to the implementation of
Texas’ strict new voting laws, which went into effect on Dec. 2. According to Assistant Secretary of State for Communications Sam Taylor, the form change was necessary because “the legislature decided to increase the penalty for illegal voter registration.” Taylor told KUT that illegal voter registration is now a class A misdemeanor, which is punishable by up to one year in jail and a $4,000 fine.
After public outcry on the limited availability of ballots, which makes it impossible for many new voters to even register in the first place, Taylor issued a statement to KUT clarifying that the old form will suffice. “While we have made clear to officials and groups that they should not be distributing the old version of the Voter Registration form, county voter registrars may accept completed voter registration applications on the old form, so long as the application is otherwise valid," Taylor said in a statement. The old form is
readily available to print while the new one can be obtained only by filling out your information under a
portal on the Secretary of State website. The portal warns that anyone looking to even type in dummy copy to generate a voter registration form faces penalty of perjury. The new form only offers a printing option while the old form can be easily saved to a computer as a PDF. The information fields on the old form also can be reset with the click of a button, making it extremely easy to print up as many voter registration forms as your heart desires in order to register more voters.
Even with a verbal agreement from Taylor indicating that “using last year’s form in and of itself is not fatal to the voter’s registration application,” there is no guarantee
within Senate Bill 1 that an old form will be accepted past Dec. 2, when the law went into effect. Given the tight restrictions enacted that include regular purging of voter rolls, it’s hard not to imagine Texas arbitrarily enforcing its rule mandating new voter registration forms and doing away with the old forms they may receive from voters desperate for their voices to be heard. This is one of the most obvious examples of why passing voting rights legislation is so important.
Texas is one of 11 states that don’t even allow residents to register to vote online—perhaps one of the easiest ways to register voters—and Texas lawmakers clearly appear disinterested in changing that. But Congress can help voters in Texas and across the country.
Call on Senate lawmakers to carve out the filibuster in order to pass the Freedom to Vote Act (FTVA) and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act (JLVRAA) .
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